Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

11 See OR, 331 52 2e: Lika’s letters to Anton 1899; some are in Perepiska, II, 1984, 16–59.

  12 See OR, 331 60 43: T. Sukhotina-Tolstaia’s letters to Anton, 1896–9.

  13 The banter hid some mysteries: a letter from Nina Korsh (the daughter of the Moscow theatre owner), had, in a male hand, a note, perhaps not a joke: ‘Listen, Chekhov, I must talk seriously. If you invited me only to hear a humiliating refusal, and one transmitted to a girl who has been intriguing against me, then that is vile.’ Around 1899 Nina Korsh conceived a child: the father is unknown. In the 1950s Nina Korsh’s daughter told the scholar Iu. K. Avdeev that she believed Chekhov was her father, but I have found no written corroboration and Anton’s casual references to Nina Korsh and her daughter belie the claim.

  14 Levitan had wished him (8 Feb. 1899, OR, 331 49 25g): ‘The Lord send you everything except sluts with gonorrhœa.’

  15 See PSSP, 8, 472.

  SIXTY-NINE

  Last Season in Melikhovo

  April–August 1899

  ON ARRIVAL IN MOSCOW Anton was summoned to the Theatrical Committee and insulted. He withdrew Uncle Vania from state theatres and passed the Moscow rights to the play to the Moscow Arts Theatre. Masha’s flat was too cold, so they moved to warmer quarters. No sooner had Anton settled than he started on proofs for Adolf Marx. He grimly told visitors that, as he had not long to live, he had sold his work, to edit it definitively.1 Friends were dismayed by how much he rejected. In July 1899 a former editor, Menshikov, told Anton that he made Herod seem like an infant by comparison, and that others would disinter the work after his death, but Anton’s response was that the public should be spared juvenilia. While Anton’s cull disposed of his weaker humorous stories, and his revisions cut the purple passages from many stories, very often he reacted to some fine work with a distaste that is unaccountable, unless the work that he rejected had some private unhappy associations.

  Lent ended on Sunday 18 April. Anton went, unannounced, to see the Knippers. Olga Knipper lived with her widowed mother and her mother’s two brothers, Sasha Salza, an army officer, and Karl Salza, a doctor. The Knippers and Salzas were second-generation Russian, German-speaking Lutherans. They had not yet intermarried with Slavs. Anton had not known such people before. They were indefatigably robust – the Knippers had been ruined, and were fighting their way back to prosperity. They were also musical. Olga could sing as well as act, and her mother Anna, although nearing fifty, was a soloist as well as Professor of Singing at the Conservatoire. Uncle Sasha, an amateur singer, was a heavy-drinking, sometimes rowdy, rake. The Knippers and the Chekhovs were struck by each other’s strangeness. Olga enchanted Anton in life, just as Tsaritsa Irina had on stage. She lacked Lika Mizinova’s classical beauty, or the intensity of Komissarzhevskaia: her eyes were small, her jowls heavy. Her character was spontaneous but organized: she worked and played hard. She could hike across fields, nurse the sick, behave genteelly, or prance uninhibitedly.

  From 18 April 1899 on Anton became monogamous. He flirted perfunctorily with Masha’s wealthy new friend, Maria Malkiel, but barely bothered with others, even the archpriest’s daughter, Nadia Ternovskaia. (Nadia worried, ‘the reason you don’t want to stay in Yalta is that there won’t be any Antonovkas?’2) Anton took Olga to see Levitan’s exhibition and his renowned Haystacks in Moonlight. In May Melikhovo would be warm enough to be habitable, despite its neglected state. Anton invited Olga to spend a few days there with him. She agreed, as long as Nemirovich-Danchenko would release her from rehearsals.

  Four days after Easter, Tolstoy called. The next day his daughter came and invited Anton and Masha to call. Tolstoy and Anton talked of many things: Tolstoy, who respected those he violently disagreed with, spoke up for Suvorin, who had wired Chekhov a draft of his trial defence. Anton replied that he should deny the union’s right to try him. Suvorin wired a new draft. ‘Beautifully written, but too many details,’ Anton responded with exhortations, then he gave up, realizing that he was ‘just a stone splashing into water’. Lidia Avilova was staying with her brother in Moscow, and Anton used her as a conduit to Petersburg’s ‘judges’. For a while Suvorin regained his equilibrium, bought a new estate, and tried to forget about his forthcoming ‘trial’. Anton urged him to write a novel and give up journalism. On 1 May 1899 Anton invited Lidia Avilova to meet him, with her children, for coffee and buns at the station, before she departed for the country. It was a courtesy owed to her, as an attractive, talented woman and a keen researcher retrieving his stories.3

  After seeing Avilova off, Anton went to see The Seagull. It was the first time that Anton had seen a play he had written performed to his specifications. The Seagull was put on specially, with no sets and few props, in a theatre so freezing that Anton gave Stanislavsky advice only on Trigorin’s shoes and trousers, and the tempo of the final act. Although Stanislavsky had comic experience – he had been a fine Nanky Poo in The Mikado – he played his heroes as neurotics, and slowed Chekhov’s allegro to an adagio: Anton was unhappy with him as an actor, and dubious of him as a director.

  ‘With no resident status’, as Anton put it, he could write nothing new, although his mind seethed with new ideas, as his notebooks show. His new friend Gorky was banned by both police and doctors from visiting Moscow. They exchanged presents: Chekhov sent an engraved gold watch; Gorky promised a rifle. In mid July, after emerging from three weeks in prison, Gorky made Anton a very original present, too late for Anton to make any use of it: ‘a fallen woman, Klavdia Gross, will bring you her life story, which she has written. She is decent, speaks languages, a proper miss – a fine woman even if a prostitute. I think she is more use to you than to me.’4

  The family home, it was agreed, was in Yalta: on 2 May Anton asked Vania, who was off to the Crimea on holiday, to keep an eye on the builders, and take with him the family treasures, notably Pavel’s icon of St John the Divine. Valuables went for safety to Yalta; Melikhova was a fire risk, neglected and underinsured. Vania could live for free in Autka, attended by Mustafa: the roof was on, the kitchen nearly ready. Vania was grateful for Anton’s lobbying to secure him pensionable rank, and was content to spend his school holidays as site manager in the Crimea.

  On 5 May Anton gave Olga Knipper a signed photograph of the cottage at Melikhovo where he had written the play that brought them together. Three days later he joined his sister and mother there, after eight months’ absence, to be met by two berserk, half-feral dachshunds. There, the next day, he greeted Olga; her short visit gave her a misleading, rosy impression of Melikhovo. Masha invited her to return: ‘We long to see you, dear Olga; the horses will wait for you on Saturday’.5

  After Olga had left, Melikhovo lapsed into chaos. A month passed in the search for stove-makers, and haggling to finish the third school. Melikhovo was like Arkadina’s and Sorin’s estate in The Seagull. ‘I constantly shout loud abuse, I tear my vocal cords, but neither I nor the guests are given horses,’ Anton complained. Made to feel unwelcome at Melikhovo, Misha told Masha on 16 May:

  All the hints in my letters to Antosha have been left unanswered, worse, his letters to me are full of anxiety that I might bring my family down to Melikhovo … I am sad that circumstances prevent me meeting our mother and showing her our little Evgenia. In secret from you two (I was afraid you’d be offended) I got in touch with the Semenkoviches and asked them to put me up just for a month from 20 June … at the end of June Antosha will send you round his houses in Yalta to deal with building. Is that your job? Are you a builder, a manager? Don’t you have enough to do in Moscow and Melikhovo? People go to the Crimea to rest.

  Anton did not feign any liking for Misha’s company. On 21 May 1899, without the blessing he coveted from his mother, Misha took his wife and child to the Crimea: they stayed at Alupka, forty miles from Gurzuf and Vania’s family. The house at Autka was not yet habitable and Küchük-Köy was too remote for either Vania or Misha, even had Anton consented. Vania moved in with Misha at Alupka.

  June be
gan warm. Anton returned to Melikhovo, to sell it. The whole district was in shambles. The bridge over the river had collapsed and the district head of schools had been charged with embezzlement. Masha no longer saw any prospect of staying there, as she told Maria Drozdova in mid June.

  I feel like a tram that’s left the rails and can’t get back on them and is jumping all over the place. I have no idea where we shall live … Anton is ripping everything off the walls, sending it to the Crimea, now the comfortable wicker armchair has vanished from the balcony.6

  The estate was advertised for 25,000 roubles with a 5000-rouble mortgage. Brom, the dachshund dog, foamed at the mouth and was shot as a rabies suspect. Anton ordered ropes, matting, packing cases and stripped the house. He mobilized Sinani in Yalta to store his possessions in the outbuildings already nearing completion. Cousin Georgi in Taganrog counted Anton’s railway wagons, as they rolled in from Melikhovo via Moscow, and oversaw the transfer of books, wardrobes, desks, divans and the ‘archive’ on to the boat to Yalta. Ironwork, plumbing, door fittings and wallpaper were ordered from Moscow for Shapovalov to install in Autka.

  In Moscow Nemirovich-Danchenko made a start on Uncle Vania, to astound the 1899–1900 season. Anton asked his colleague Dr Kurkin for a cartogram of Serpukhov district that Stanislavsky could use as Astrov. In a postscript to Masha’s letter he began his correspondence with Olga, addressing her ‘Hello, last page of my life’ and, as he had Kleopatra Karatygina and Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, ‘Great artist of the Russian land’. Olga was off to Georgia, to stay with her brother Konstantin in the cathedral city of Mtskheta. She and Anton arranged to meet in late summer.

  Anton took time away from Melikhovo to visit Petersburg. He arrived on the morning of 11 June, met Adolf Marx and asked him to print the plays with diagrams of Stanislavsky’s staging.7 He had his photograph taken in two studios. He did not go to see Suvorin. The dank cold sent him back the same day to Moscow.

  All summer Masha was stranded in Melikhovo, fighting cockroaches and showing buyers round. Anton lived in Moscow with Masha the servant, whose lover haunted the kitchen. He strolled the boulevards and chatted to ‘fallen’ women at the Aquarium. He visited Pavel’s grave, which was overgrown with brambles, and found an estate agent. Now that he had built his last school, he wrote to Suvorin, he had no sentiment for the estate: it was ‘mined out’ as literary material. By July two potential buyers had appeared. The first, Ianov, was a burnt-cork manufacturer who strung the Chekhovs along week by week. By the time Ianov dropped out, the other buyer, the young Boris Zaitsev, eventually a fine emigré prose writer, had bought another estate. Anton descended on Melikhovo to dig up any shrub that could be replanted at Autka. On 5 July 1899 he abandoned for ever his dachshund bitch Quinine and the estate into which he had poured so much time and energy.

  *

  Anton’s mind was on Olga Knipper. He said he would meet her in the Caucasus, ‘on condition you do not make me lose my head.’ He told Masha to rely on the estate agent. She protested that there were no horses to fetch buyers from the station. She begged Anton to come to Melikhovo and ‘rest’ until autumn frosts drove him to the Crimea. Aghast at coping alone with the sale of an estate – ‘To hell with buyers. I’m sad and lonely’ – she would rather take the 21,000 roubles that Ianov seemed to be offering, than ruin her health, and Anton’s, seeking better offers.

  Anton had his way. On 8 July 1899 he wired Olga and arranged to meet her in the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. From there they would take the overnight boat to Yalta together. Four days later he took the train south to Taganrog. Misha, back from the Crimea, went to the station to intercept him before he left Moscow, but there were so many friends seeing Anton off that Misha could not get a word in. (He took his wife and child, in Anton’s absence, to Melikhovo, and lived there, beset by bittersweet memories, for a week.) In Taganrog Anton stayed not with his cousins but at the Hotel Europe. He visited the brothel, which was now run by a Jew. He saw a body covered with flies in the market, and started an appeal for a mortuary. From a Tatar vendor he had his first (but not his last) taste of koumiss, fermented mares’ milk. He told the town’s councillors what trees to plant. He felt ill and he let an old school friend, Dr Shamkovich, examine him at the hotel. On 17 July he took a boat to Novorossiisk.

  Misha and his family returned desolate to Iaroslavl. An escaped convict was prowling Melikhovo, so Masha spent the nights shaking in her bed. Meanwhile Anton led Olga Knipper off the boat at Yalta. To the dismay of the Antonovkas, their arrival together was noted in the Crimean Courier. Anton stayed in the Hotel Mariino, while Olga found lodgings with the ailing Dr Sredin. For twelve days they strolled Yalta, took a carriage up to the viewing point at Oreanda and watched Babakai build the house and Mustafa the garden at Autka. The trees that had been planted in spring were growing rapidly. Olga and Anton were not altogether happy, for travel and travails had shattered Anton’s precarious summer health. Anton reported to Masha, ‘she was having tea with me; she just sits and says nothing.’ The next day he wrote, ‘Knipper is here, very nice, but she is depressed.’ He lost interest in everything else. He told Masha to sell Melikhovo for half price.

  Sazonova, who had recorded Anton’s moods in 1896, was in Yalta; her husband had inherited an estate nearby. Her diary from 24 to 31 July 1899 notes:

  Chekhov took to Massandra the Moscow actress who acted in his Seagull. We dined in the town park … We met Chekhov there, he came and sat at our table. He wears grey trousers and a desperately short blue jacket. He complains that in winter he is worn down by visitors in Yalta. He has settled out of town on purpose … Chekhov is not a conversational man … He either replies reluctantly or starts to pontificate like Suvorin, ‘Ermolova is a bad actress … Gorky is a good writer …’

  I saw Chekhov on the promenade. He sits all alone on a little bench.8

  On 2 August 1899 Olga and Anton took a carriage across the mountain towards the ancient Tatar capital of Bakhchisarai. Through sultry heat they crossed the beautiful Kök-Köz [Blue Eye] valley, wondering who was waving frantically at them: it was a group of doctors who had recognized Chekhov. They took the train together to Moscow, and parted more than friends. For a fortnight Anton had written nothing.

  The agent had found a new buyer for Melikhovo, a timber merchant called Mikhail Konshin, who would buy the estate in his wife’s name, but was interested only in felling and selling Chekhov’s forests. Konshin was to pay 23,000 roubles and 5000 for fittings. He had not sold his last estate, so the agreement was that he would pay 1000 roubles cash, give an IOU for 4000, and find the rest over the years. In their hurry, the Chekhovs ceded everything, but Konshin, like Marx, had fleeced Anton. The 10,000 roubles that Anton promised Masha as her share melted away. Anton banked the 5000 that Konshin eventually put down and let her draw 25 roubles a month interest – no more than her salary from the ‘Dairy’ school, or the allowance that Misha secretly made her.

  Konshin moved into Melikhovo on 14 August and Masha went to join Anton in Moscow. Evgenia lived with Konshin until 20 August. In Masha’s absence, Quinine, the dachshund bitch, had her eye ripped out by a farm dog and ran into Varenikov’s yard, where she died in agony. Masha had gone back to pack the crockery. Breaking the news of Quinine’s end, she told Anton: ‘Not a lot of fun, darling! God grant we get out of here quickly. It has been raining ever since we came. The road is sheer horror. We are wet to the bone … Give my regards to your Knipper woman.’ When the sale was over, Masha made her feelings plain to Misha:

  On Monday 6 September I am taking mother and the old Mariushka to the Crimea on the mail train … We sold Melikhovo, but how! … I am so fed up with Melikhovo that I agreed to anything … Anton didn’t want to accept these terms. Perhaps Konshin is a crook, what can we do! … I don’t think I shall have any money for a long time, which is why I turn to you. Merci I received the cheque, Anton forbade me to stop teaching, hinting that I shall have no private life, but I don’t care. I shall spend a win
ter in Moscow and then see what happens … Anton was very ill when he came back from the Crimea – he had bad bronchitis, a high temperature and even some bleeding.9

  On 25 August Anton finished the proofs of his collected Plays for Marx. He called his symptoms ‘flu’. He was seen off from Moscow to Yalta by Olga Knipper, who was led away in tears and then comforted by Masha. Anton had gone to make the Yalta house habitable for his womenfolk.

  Notes

  1 See the memoirs of Anatoli Iakovlev, whom Anton had tutored as a boy, LN68, 597–604.

  2 See OR, 331 60 24: Nadezhda Ternovskaia’s letters to Anton 1899; E. A. Polotskaia, ‘Ialtinskaia redaktsia “Shutochki”’ in Chekhoviana, 1993, 101–16.

  3 Given Anton’s absorption in Olga Knipper, it is unlikely that he came to this brief encounter laden with the erotic angst in which Avilova’s memoirs steep this meeting.

  4 Quoted in PSSP, 8, 517.

  5 See OR, 331 105 1: Masha’s letters to Olga, 1899. Some are in Knipper-Chekhova, 1972, II.

  6 See RGALI, 549 1 408: Masha’s letters to Maria Drozdova, 1898–1905; see PSSP, 8, 516.

  7 Marx would break the agreement and print just Chekhov’s texts, without the Stanislavsky mis-en-scène, which have only recently been published – as though Brahms’s symphonies were printed without dynamics.

  8 See Smirnova-Sazonova’s diary LN87, 310.

  9 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha’s letters to Misha, 1884–1904: 3 Sept. 1899.

  SEVENTY

  Uncle Vania Triumphant

  September–November 1899

  ANTON SPENT THE NIGHT of 27 August 1899 at his new house. Only the servant’s quarters and kitchen wing were ready: walled in by packing cases, attended by Mustafa, he camped with a paraffin stove and two candlesticks. He brewed tea with water from his own well. He dined at the girls’ school. Mustafa lugged trunks and boxes from cellars all round Yalta. Anton checked linen, chose wallpaper, urged the builders to sand the floors and install the water closet. He planted out Olga’s gift, a ‘Queen of the Night’ cactus, which he called the ‘Green Reptile’. He joined a consumers’ union for groceries and claimed a 20 per cent discount on baths for members of the writers’ union. He ordered grass seed for Küchük-Köy and hundreds of flowerpots. All the Marx money was spent: no more was payable until December. Konshin had not paid up. Anton borrowed 5000 roubles from Efim Konovitser, his lawyer. Russian Thought advanced 3000. ‘We Chekhovs,’ Misha told Masha, ‘are bad savers.’